FORTALEZA, Brazil — On the outside, the Villa Veneto is just another of the nondescript high-rise hotels catering to the foreign visitors who flock to this beachside resort town.
But take a look inside, and something unusual becomes apparent. A large number of the hotel's clientele, it seems, fit a particular profile: single, middle- aged European men, some overweight, others balding, and many in the company of scantily dressed, attractive young Brazilian women less than half their age.
These aren't businessmen in town for a convention. Chances are, authorities say, they're sex tourists, men seeking flesh for sale thousands of miles from home, in a land where they are anonymous and, by local standards, fabulously rich.
Over the last several years, Fortaleza and other cities along Brazil's northern coast have increasingly become magnets for what officials lament are the wrong kinds of visitors. Travel agencies in countries such as Italy and Germany openly market tour packages to Brazil that include the services of female escorts, sometimes girls barely into their teens.
Now officials here are trying to stop the burgeoning trade, even as events around the world threaten to thwart them.
"UNICEF and international groups have really had their eyes trained on Asia," where sex tourism has long been a problem, said Patricia Campos of Cedeca, a local human rights group. Because of that, "there's been a migration of tourists of this kind to the northeast of Brazil -- to Fortaleza, Natal, Recife. With the recent [tsunami] catastrophe in Asia, we're afraid that this shift will intensify."
Fighting it, however, means taking on the law of supply and demand in one of the poorest parts of the country, where thousands live in miserable slums and prostitution is often seen as a quick way out. Paid sex is allowed in Brazil; only pimping is illegal. Another twist in the law makes it difficult even to arrest men who pay for sex with girls between the ages of 14 and 18, although legislators are hoping to close that loophole.
To reverse the influx of sex tourists, authorities are faced with the daunting task of dismantling an industry that involves not just the hookers and their customers, but cabbies, hoteliers and even real estate agents, all of whom have cornered their own bit of profit from the traffic in sex.
